


a little girl's dream

by pprfaith



Series: grow up mean [7]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Fast and the Furious Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Buffy Insert, Community: wishlist_fic, Established Relationship, F/M, M/M, Moving On, Not Beta Read, Prompt Fic, Sequel, Slayers, Threesome, a little angsty, a little cracky, it's weird - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:28:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21888190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: Buffy is not Anna and Anna is not Buffy.
Relationships: Brian O'Conner/Buffy Summers/Carter Verone
Series: grow up mean [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/365114
Comments: 27
Kudos: 255





	a little girl's dream

**Author's Note:**

> For Stellarluna35 who asked for this verse, Buffy and demons. This might not be exactly what you expected, though, because I kind of ran with 'how does this verse's Buffy deal with slaying', when you probably meant something more direct. Sorry, and I hope you like it anyway.
> 
> Title from Control by Poe, which gave this series its name.

+

Anna is not Buffy.

Buffy is not Anna. 

It’s like having multiple personalities, except they don’t live side by side, but one after the other.

It’s like growing up into a completely different person over a really short span of time – which is pretty much exactly what happened, with a little paradigm shift thrown in and a year of hard living to round things off. 

It’s like not being the person she was when she was seventeen. 

Anna would bet good money on a shrink probably putting the change in personality down as an extreme reaction to trauma, or a coping mechanism. A little like Stockholm Syndrome, which isn’t quite what pop-culture likes to joke about, but instead a survival mechanism, an adjustment of views and personality to increase chances of survival in a hostile environment. 

What? She reads.

Sometimes. 

Okay, she watched a few documentaries. Whatever. It makes sense.

Her point is that Anna is very much the opposite of who Buffy was and if anyone knew them both, they’d probably gape and blink a lot, except no-one does. Anna is Anna pretty much always. Buffy is Before. Buffy is weak. Buffy isn’t welcome in this new life, except in its softest, most intimate moments, where being weak isn’t really… weakness. Where it’s okay. Where the world isn’t trying to eat her.

“Is it – do you want me to call you that?” Carter asks, when she tells him, late at night, a little tired and a little fucked-out. 

Buffy. Buffy. Buffy. 

A little sentimental.

Little girl lost. 

She shakes her head. “No. I just… Buffy Summers. That’s who I used to be. Thought you should know.”

It’s the key to all her past, her files, her records, her entire life. And she’s handing it to him because even though he’s a bad man fourteen years older than her, she thinks she’s a little bit in love with him. With how he looks at her, and touches her and never asks for more than she wants to give, even though he does it with everyone else. 

He rolls over from his boneless sprawl to sling one arm over her lower ribs and prop himself up with the other. Studies her face. 

“Anna, then,” he tells her, with that tiny hint of an accent that only comes out after midnight and too many drinks.

A week later, all her juvenile records are sealed by court order and that’s as good as an ‘I love you’ as Carter is probably ever going to say. 

Anna hears him, loud and clear. 

It’s fine. 

It’s good. 

It’s a line in the sand that Anna keeps to, almost always.

Anna isn’t Buffy.

Logically, it follows that Anna also isn’t the vampire slayer. 

And yet.

+

“I. Am. Not. The. Freaking. Slayer,” she bites, fist by fist and the punchline is a dagger to the eyesocket. 

“Asshole.”

She wipes the brackish green blood off her hands, tucks away her dagger and picks up her duffel, halfway between Cali and Miami, between Buffy and Anna. 

“So rude.”

(As long as she jokes about it, she doesn’t feel like crying at all.)

+

So.

She doesn’t go out to slay, but she never quite manages to walk away, either. 

Not really. 

She may not be the good girl hero trope anymore, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to close her eyes and stick her fingers in her ears. Sometimes, she kills a monster or two.

In a truck stop in Nevada, still wearing overalls and pigtails, stake in her pocket more out of habit than intent, saving a hooker from a bloodless death.

“What the hell?” the woman screams as dust rains down. 

Anna doesn’t pun the way Buffy would, isn’t even Anna yet, not really. (The middle, remember?) So far, she hasn’t talked to anyone long enough to need to give a name. She just smiles, tiredly, and offers, softly, “Don’t go with anyone whose skin feels cold, okay?”

And leaves. 

And keeps leaving through dozens of similar encounters all across the lower forty-eight.

She worries at first, when she settles down in Miami, because the Council, and also because Carter. Because running away from destiny and leaving traces.

It turns out to be a non-issue. The Council never shows because she never makes waves bigger than any other random monster hunter around and Carter?

Runs an underground empire. He’s well aware. 

They have a little ‘huh’ moment the first time a business deal goes south and two of the bodyguards grow fangs and scales. Anna expects Carter to freak, Carter expects Anna to freak, neither of them do. She kills them, they close the deal anyway.

Done.

After that, she sometimes pulls a vampire looking for an easy snack from one of his clubs and stabs them in a back alley. 

Every now and then, she cleans up a demon mess without much fanfare. She’ll just grab her favorite knives and make a night of it. He doesn’t comment, as long as she’s not killing associates of his. 

But then, he’s cleaning house in subtle ways and anyone who shows up on Anna’s kill list isn’t someone he’s keen on doing business with (anymore) either. 

(That, too, they only talk about once. It goes like this:

“Soooo, Titus.”

“Yes?” Carter drawls, leaning back in his seat, cigar in hand, seventeen kinds of cliché.

“I heard he had an… unfortunate accident.”

He hums, puffs on his cigar with a smirk. She hates those damn things.

“Why? Six months ago when I asked very nicely for his head on a platter, you said no.”

Titus was a pimp. The rough kind that tended to leave his girls bloody and, if they got picked up by the cops, abandoned them to hang. The kind that ran a skeevy abortion clinic out of a bar backroom and didn’t leave his girls much choice about using the service.

Cigar. Smirk. “I might have reconsidered.”

After that, the worst of the lot start disappearing. Anna doesn’t ask again. But she does stop giving him shit about the damn cigars. 

For a while.)

So. Non-issue. Anna isn’t Buffy, but she kills monsters when she sees them and Carter lets her, much like he lets her do anything else – because he can’t stop her anyway and doesn’t want to. 

+

It’s different with Brian. 

They’re still in Miami, playing the cops. That particular day, they’re having a clandestine meeting after slipping Anna’s ‘jailers’ in the form of Roberto and Enrique. The two men are doing a fantastic job of pretending to get tricked into a street festival while Anna and Brian slip away down a narrow side-alley. 

Which just so happens to be occupied by two demons trying to snack on a teenage boy. 

Hell no!

Anna is already going for her blades when Brian suddenly grabs her, trying to drag her away. Turns out LA cops get told about the things that go bump, in a roundabout way. At the very least, they get told never to engage unless they outnumber two to one and, if possible, to cover up any freakiness.

So when Anna slips his grip and runs for the two demons, both of which easily weigh twice as much as her, he has a very understandable, if unnecessary heart attack. 

By the time she’s killed them both and sent the kid on his way, he’s mostly recovered. 

“So you know?” he asks, looking kind of shocky, still. 

Anna pointedly twirls a blade. 

“And you’re not – scared?”

She looks at the corpses. Then at Brian. 

He shrugs. “We were told to pretty much turn tail and run like hell. Let someone else handle it.”

She shrugs right back. “Well, maybe I used to be someone else,” she confesses, without really confessing anything.

In the end, Brian’s ability to roll with just about any punch and duck any curveball wins out. That, and that fact that they’re pressed for time. He gives the two dead demons one last, lingering look and then they move on. Literally and figuratively. 

After that, it’s a non-issue with Brian, too. 

Or, well. Later, in Rio, when he’s Bri instead of Brian and she’s sometimes Buffy, in the privacy of their three-person bedroom, he tells her to be careful when she packs certain knives. 

She always promises. 

He always waits up anyway. 

But that’s the opposite of an issue, so. 

+

In Rio – South America in general – the supernatural is a lot closer under the surface. Anna wants to put it down to the more traditional, superstitious way of life, but Roberto calls that kind of thing ‘white people hoodoo bullshit mentality’, a ‘savages in the jungle’ kind of thinking and he’s not wrong, so she just lets it be. It is what it is. In Rio, most everyone is aware that there are things moving in the dark. Few people talk about it. 

It is what it is. 

A lot of those things in the shadows make trouble for Carter when he tries to lay down the groundwork for a new empire. Some do so on the orders of Reyes. Most just do it because they like their little territories, their little businesses, their little dirty deals. 

Some of them, Carter folds in ruthlessly. 

The ones that deal too dirty, the ones that kill or torture or deal in human flesh in any way, Anna gets rid of. 

(“Is this going to be run like Miami?” she asks, beating around the bush as delicately as she ever gets. 

He eyes her over his newspaper, obviously not impressed. Brian isn’t here, yet, or he’d snicker into his coffee.

“How else would I run it?”

Like he did before Anna brought herself and all her slightly off-center morals on board. She doesn’t say it. Picks up a strawberry instead and molests it with her tongue because Carter is sometimes very predictable and he reacts well to a basic reward system.)

It puts them in a funny position, the killing of the worst elements: while Carter buffers the absence of the demon gangs and clans in the human (read: crime) world, their absence leaves a void in the demonic power structure in the city. Which does not obey to Reyes, no matter what the man thinks. 

(Taking him down is almost, _almost_ worth the hollow look Brian sports for weeks after Dom and Mia blow through his life, in and out, and all the old scars ripped open.)

No, there’s a world wholly separate from crime, supernatural but harmless, and Anna accidentally leaves it floundering in a power struggle.

So she kills a few more demons. And a few vampires. And one really, really gross tentacle thing that destroys half a favela after getting summoned by some asshole with a hankering for godhood. 

Then she kills the asshole. Violently. With a shiny red fire axe. 

Afterwards, there is silence. The lights flicker overhead, one of the poles rigged with far too many cables is kind of crooked and a little broken. The asphalt under her feet is cracked, a few cars are damaged beyond repair and she’s pretty sure her left arm is broken. 

There is also slime and bits of rubbery tentacle-monster covering everything. 

Anna stands in the middle of the mess, good hand clutching an axe she can’t remember picking up, breathing hard. At her feet, a robed demonic monster summoner lies, ribcage so much meat and bone. 

A dozen other demons in similar ceremonial robes are arrayed around the fight zone, a little worse for wear. All of them stare. 

Anna forces her back straight and her breathing calm. “I have had it up to here,” she tells them in passable Portuguese, “with people trying to end the world, fuck over this city, or try to otherwise make a pain of themselves. No more human sacrifices, no more summonings and no more goddamn street battles, am I making myself clear?”

She might be bellowing the last at the top of her lungs. It’s been a long night. There is slime in her nostrils. 

One of the robed demons gives a slow nod. It’s kind of really deep and involves bending over. Then another follows. Then another. 

Eventually, all non-human entities left alive on the premises agree to her terms. 

Great. She waves at them as she turns to see if her bike, parked one street over, survived. “Now clean this shit up. And fix the lights. People need those. Not everyone can see in the dark.”

Then she goes to get the longest shower _ever_. 

+

A few hours later, Carter and Bri both stare at her as she recounts the whole thing from under a cloud of foam and bubbles. (She rinsed off first. Three times. And used up a whole box of Kleenex to ungunk her nose. Eugh.)

“And then I left them there because slime. Up my nostrils.”

Bri, who has been undressing in short burst from the suit Carter forced him into this morning, pauses with his briefs halfway down his thighs. “You do realize that you just – “

He’s stopped by Carter, who waves his free hand to silence him. His other hand is playing with the foam where he’s seated at the edge of the tub, still in slacks and shirt. “Don’t. Let her figure it out by herself.”

“Let me figure what out?” she demands.

For a moment, Brian and Carter stare at each other. Then Bri shrugs and drops his briefs.

There’s not much more conversation after that. 

+

“Oh shit, did I just set myself up as queen of the demons? _By accident_?!”

Brian grunts and turns over in his sleep, arms windmilling. Carter winces at the palm slapping at his back and cracks one eye. “There she goes,” he mutters, and goes back to sleep. 

+

Buffy was a vampire slayer.

Anna rules the demonic underworld of Rio de Janeiro. 

Life, as Brian is apt to say with a few beers in him, is really fucking weird. 

+

Things settle down a lot after the tentacle monster.

Thanks to her connection with Carter, Anna is already sort of known to the underbelly of the city and the demonic part has only a few false starts in testing out her moral limits. 

After a few bodies, they stick within the lines. 

In a shocking turn of events, demons no longer work for Hernando Reyes. Word on the street is the man throws a week-long hissy fit over it, before starting to hire human muscle anywhere he can find it to recoup his loss in workforce. 

Which is how Vince, Brian’s old buddy-slash-nemesis gets wrapped up in a car-jacking gone wrong and brings all of Brian’s past crashing down on their doorstep.

It’s a fun few weeks and ends when Dom and Mia, the ugliest of Bri’s scars, leave town with a whole load of cash and a promise to never return. The rest of their crew trickle out after them, except for Han and Gisele. 

Gisele is exactly the kind of professional kickassery Anna appreciates and Han is Bri’s perfect counterpart in zen. Neither of them were around when Brian got burned by Team Toretto, so there is nothing holding them back from making friends with each other. 

The fact that Gisele isn’t entirely human doesn’t really factor into it, except for when she helps Anna beat up assholes and actually manages to keep up. 

So the two get a standing invite to the villa and use it to pretty much take over the pool house.

“Do you think Dom is pissed you poached his friends?” Anna asks, idly twirling a straw in her empty glass.

Bri shrugs. “I’d like to say he’s not that petty, but – “

Yeah. That. 

+

Carter’s past caught them up in the shitstorm that was Miami, even if they got out of it clean in the end. 

Brian’s netted them Rio and a few new friends. 

It should not come as a surprise that Anna’s comes knocking only six months later, ready to pull her under. 

+

Her hair is cut short. Practical. A sleek, black bob, ruler straight. It matches her slim, Asian features, her slight build. 

She moves like a predator, or a dancer.

Anna counts seven knives and four stakes on her person. 

She can’t be a day over sixteen. 

She remembers Kendra, bloodless and still in her arms. She remember Buffy, in a cave, in the dark, and the water in her lungs. 

The slayer is dead. Long live the slayer. 

She wonders how many there were, between then and now, between those girls and this one. 

She’s sitting on a rooftop terrace with her boys, Gisele and Han, watching her move below, trying to find someone to talk to. Interrogate. Or maybe interview. Her movements are surprisingly non-aggressive. The watcher at her side seems content to let her take the lead. 

Some things have changed. 

Maybe. 

“Gisele,” she asks, without taking her eyes off the girl. “Please go downstairs and inform them that this town polices itself. Tell them how we run things and that there are other places that need them more. Tell the girl,” she pauses, licks her lips and tries to remember being sixteen and terrified. It comes too easily, still. “Tell her that slayer doesn’t just mean kill. Not if she doesn’t want it to.”

She nods, once, to herself and motions for Gisele to move. She does, grabbing both Han and his ever-present snack to drag along with her. 

Brian and Carter stay where they are, still, watching her watch the slayer. 

They sit, side by side, her boys, patient and quiet and the best thing that ever happened to her. The only reason, really, she’s still here, still holding on, still _Anna_. Without Carter to catch her and Brian to remind her how to laugh, she would have sunk back into that other girl a long time ago. Out of guilt. Out of necessity. Out of resignation and a lack of other options. 

But they’re here and she knows they won’t ever leave. Not unless she makes them. 

And they’ve never asked, but – “I was her. A long time ago. When I was still Buffy. Before I decided I wasn’t going to die for a world that didn’t give a fuck. She’s… she’s my replacement. Probably half a dozen times over. We don’t have a great shelf life.”

She tries to chuckle, lets it die in her mouth, stillborn sound. Not actually funny.

Below, their friends exit the building and cut through the hubbub on the street to meet slayer and watcher, their body language carefully non-aggressive. Hell, Han is still munching on his chips. 

She turns away. 

Brian fiddles with his beer, Carter puts down his drink. He, at least, knows what a slayer is. He has to, with how closely he’s worked with demons before. Brian doesn’t, not really. Doesn’t need to, either. He understands a lot more than the mask of the Californian surfer himbo lets on.

“You survived. Ain’t gonna judge you for that.” Not too long ago, Anna watched Brian stand in front of a man he once called friend (who still calls him ‘traitor’), gaze level and shoulders straight and tell him that he did what he had to do. He has no time for soft, useless things like regret. 

Most of the time, she doesn’t either. 

“If I hadn’t run, maybe she wouldn’t be fighting for her life every night now.” She motions toward the girl. 

Most of the time.

“Some other girl would instead. Or you would. You don’t have any more or less right to a life than any of them. You just took it.” It’s unusual, for Carter to get into a moral discussion like that. Usually, he just does what he thinks needs doing and fuck morals. 

It’s for her, she knows. For her peace of mind. For a ruthless crime lord, he’s far too kind to her. 

“Personally,” Bri adds, his most boyish grin on his face, “I’m just glad you’re here.”

On the street, the watcher says a few words. The slayer nods. They turn to leave. Han looks toward the terrace, giving them an exaggerated thumbs-up. Then he motions down the street, to where the slayer went. They’ll follow them to make sure they behave, Anna understands. 

She nods, even though he probably can’t make it out and then stands to round the table and slip into Bri’s lap. The terrace is part of a restaurant they own and the staff are discreet, but it’s still public and Carter isn’t fond of PDA that doesn’t serve as a power play. 

Bri doesn’t care. 

He puts down his beer and wraps his arms around her, lets her hide her face in his neck. A moment later, Carter’s palm settles on her calf under the table. It’s big and warm and her breath doesn’t hitch. 

Anna isn’t Buffy.

Buffy isn’t Anna. 

Buffy was a vampire slayer. 

Anna rules a city full of demons. 

They are worlds and years between them. But sometimes, sometimes, they feel very close. 

+  



End file.
